By Nick Fielding, head of customer acquisition, Viddyoze
The high street used to be a place you’d meet a friend for coffee or spend a few hours shopping.
You’d go there for advice, products, services, and repairs… anything you needed. Just hop on the bus and head to the high street. The town centre; city centre; the centre of everything from business and commerce to socialising and dining.
Now, social media is the city centre of the modern world. And that’s where you’ll find the digital high street. The only difference is that it never closes – it’s open 24/7 all year round.
But we know this already, right? Social media has, after all, been around for years now, and it’s nothing new. What is new, however, is our relationship with it. With high streets closed, we had to go somewhere. And so we went online and we headed to social media.
That’s where you’ll find most of us today – and we aren’t necessarily looking to leave.
Covid-19 has changed our habits. People who’d never shopped online before now do without a second thought.
Early in the pandemic, I started helping out my elderly neighbours by getting their groceries for them as they were too scared to shop themselves. Now, they just do it online.
Everyone has had to adapt in some way. And as more people transition online, digital high streets will only thrive, grow and evolve.
People have been saying it for years that the traditional high street is dying and Covid-19 was, unfortunately, the final blow.
Of course, nothing in life is guaranteed. It’s the same for social media platforms. For every success story like TikTok, there’s always a Myspace or a Vine to watch out for.
But the takeaway is this: new platforms will always emerge. And they all have one thing in common: the same marketing can be used across any of them. And this is key. This is where the opportunity is.
Right now, all over the world, there are businesses attempting to market online for the first time. As a result, competition – and the importance of a spot on the digital high street – is skyrocketing.
All businesses, no matter the industry, are heading to the same place. But it’s not easy to make yourself heard. Standing out is more vital than ever.
Innovate and market better with video content. That’s it.
The digital high street’s major players – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok – are all pretty much defined by it. That isn’t really going to change.
There are other forms of content, but in an increasingly digital world, where people are time-poor, video has become supreme. Why? Because it works and it sells. In fact, 78 per cent of marketers say video has directly helped increase sales.
And we haven’t even talked about YouTube yet, which is, at the time of writing, the most visited website in the world. With over two billion active monthly users, there’s every reason to be on the platform. It’s key to being discovered.
Video isn’t just the future of marketing – it’s the now. There’s a reason 84% of people say that a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a product. It’s engaging, it hooks you in and it works.
The problem with video is that it’s hard to do well. Anyone can upload a video, after all, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re really not doing anything at all.
Alternatively, you can pay a professional to create videos, but this can be extremely expensive.
Or you can find a middle path – i.e. learn how to shoot videos and create animations yourself. The problem with this is it takes an enormous amount of time to do. And by the time you’ve finished learning just the basics, your competitors have already moved on.
There is, however, a fourth and better way. It’s you and it’s Viddyoze, but not quite as you know it.
What I’m talking about is Viddyoze White Label, which is a solution that you can call your own.
We’ve spent years developing our software so that our users can easily create short, attention-grabbing video content for social media at speed and at scale – all without needing any technical know-how.
With Viddyoze White Label our technology can be branded and marketed as your own.
And that’s not all. With Viddyoze White Label, you can even pass on our video animation technology to other local businesses and organizations – and, in turn, help them also set up shop on the digital high street.
Because the truth is that social media is where we all need to be. Your audience is already there. Let them discover you.